Postmodern Reads

Jacket Copy, the LA Times' book blog, offers up a list of "61 essential postmodern reads." Based on the title alone, my guess was that I hadn't read any of them; my tastes are pretty conservative. But since the category is capacious enough to include "Hamlet," I suppose I am not surprised to find that I've actually read a dozen--with a heavy tilt towards "postmodernists" long dead.

I suppose the purpose of a list like this is to provoke quarrels over the choices. If Hamlet," why not the much more modernist"Don Quixote"--? Or the still-more nonlinear "Gargantua and Pantagruel"--? Is Burton really more "postmodern" than Montaigne? If "Tristiam Shandy" makes the list, how about the French competitor so much admired by Kundera, "Jacques le Fataliste"--? If Kafka, why not Waller? If Faulkner, why not pass the (fairly conventional) "Absalom! Absalom!" for the far more innovative "Sound and the Fury" or "As I Lay Dying"--? Is it sheer inattention that overlooks Adolfo Bioy Casares, Blaise Cendrars, Henri Michaux, Raymond Queneau? And is there anything "postmodern" about "Dispatches" except the war itself? And for making war "postmodern," how about David Jones' "In Parenthesis"--? And where, frevvins sakes, is "Finnegans Wake"--?

I guess I am more torn than I thought. I have always regarded most of what passes for "postmodern" as a big yawn. Although I admit that of the ones I have read, I have enjoyed every one. Although oddly, in several cases, I prefer other works by the same authors: "Invisible Cities," much better than "If On a Winter's Night a Traveller;" "Unbearable Lightness of Being" over "Book of Laughter and Forgetting;" several Faulkners better than "Absalom!" I admit I really have no strong impulse to read many of the others on the list, although a copy of Flann O'Brien's "At Swim-Two-Birds" is on the bedside table as we speak.

I append a list of those that I have actually read, along with the crib-chart from the LA Times blog. The full list is here.

Jorge Luis Borges' "Labyrinths"
Robert Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy"
Italo Calvino's "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler"
William Faulkner's "Absalom! Absalom!"
Michael Herr's "Dispatches"
Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis"
Milan Kundera's "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting"
Vladimir Nabokov's "Pale Fire"
Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried"
W.G. Sebald's "The Rings of Saturn"
William Shakespeare's "Hamlet"
Art Spiegelman's Maus I & II
Laurence Stern's "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy"